“When's your flight?” Keola asked.
“Around two.”
“Want me to drive you? I'd be happy to do it.”
“Thanks, anyway. I've got to return my car.”
“I'm sorry how this turned out,” said Keola.
“This is going to be one of those cases, if it gets solved at all, it'll be like? seventeen years from now. A deathbed confession,” I said. “Or a deal with a jailhouse snitch.”
A little while later, I said good-bye to Eddie, threw my things together, and checked out of the hotel. I was going back to L.A. unresolved and disconsolate, feeling like I'd left a big piece of myself behind. I would've bet anything I owned that for me, at least, the story was over.
I was wrong again.
Part Three. BODY COUNT
Chapter 58
The very good-looking gentleman with the white-blond hair walked down a red, silk-lined corridor ending in a breeze-swept lobby. A stone desk rose out of the floor at the far end of the room, and a young clerk received the guest with a smile and lowered eyes.
“Your suite is ready for you, Mr. Meile. Welcome back to the Pradha Han.”
“Delighted to be here,” Henri said. He pushed his horn-rimmed glasses to the top of his head as he signed the credit card slip. “Did you keep the gulf warm for me, Rahpee?”
“Oh, yes sir. We would not disappoint our precious guest.”
Henri opened the door to the luxury suite, undressed in the lavish bedroom, tossing his clothes onto the king-size bed under the mosquito netting. He wrapped himself in a silk robe and sampled chocolates and dried mango as he watched BBC World News, thrilling to the update on “the killing spree in Hawaii that continues to confound police.”
He was thinking, That should make the Peepers happy, when the door chimes announced the arrival of his special friends.
Aroon and Sakda, slight boys in their early teens with short hair and golden skin, bowed to greet the man they knew as Mr. Paul Meile. Then they laughed and threw their arms around him as he called them by name.
The massage table was set up on the private balcony facing the beach, and as the boys smoothed the sheets and got oils and lotions out of their bags, Henri set up his video camera and framed the scene.
Aroon helped Henri out of his robe, and Sakda folded the sheets over his lower body, and then the boys began the specialty of the Pradha Han spa, the four-hand massage.
Henri sighed as the boys worked in tandem, stroking across the grain of his muscles, working in the Hmong cream, rubbing away his tensions of the past week. Hornbills screeched in the jungle, and the air was scented with jasmine. This was one of the most delicious of sensory experiences, and it was why he came to Hua Hin at least once a year.
The boys turned Henri over and pulled at his arms down to the pads of his fingers in unison, did the same with his legs and feet, stroked his brow, until Henri opened his eyes, and said in Thai, “Aroon, will you bring me my wallet from the dresser?”
When Aroon returned, Henri took a stack of bills out of the wallet, quite a lot more than the few hundred baht he owed for the massage. He waggled the money in front of the boys' faces, asked, “Would you like to stay and play some games?”
The boys giggled and helped the rich gentleman sit up on the massage table.
“What games would you like to play, Daddy?” Sakda asked.
Henri explained what he was thinking, and they nodded and clapped their hands, seeming very excited to be part of his enjoyment. He kissed their palms, each in turn.
He just loved these sweet boys.
It was a true joy to be with them.
Chapter 59
Henri woke up alone, hearing the chimes, then calling out, “Come in.”
A girl with a red flower in her hair entered, bowed, and served his morning meal on a bed tray: nam prik – rice noodles in a chili and peanut sauce – plus fresh fruit and a pot of strong black tea.
Henri's mind was churning as he ate, thinking over the night before, getting ready to edit his video for the Alliance.
Taking his tea to the desk, he called up the raw footage on his laptop, scrolled through the scene of the massage. He cut away to the shots of water flowing into the soaking tub under the round eye of the skylight, putting a title over the running water, “Ochiba Shigure.”
His next scene was a loving and long tracking shot starting at the boys' innocent faces, panning down their nude young bodies, lingering on the ropes that bound their limbs behind them.
When his own face showed on the screen, Henri used the blur tool to obscure his features as he lifted and lowered the boys into the bath. This shot was a beauty.
He cut and pasted the next sequence, making sure to edit the action so that it appeared seamless: a tight shot on his hands holding down the boys' heads as they fought and floundered, the bubbles coming from their mouths, then angles on their bodies floating, ochiba shigure, Japanese for “like leaves floating on a pond.”
Next a jump cut to Sakda's slack face, droplets of water clinging to his hair and skin. Then the camera pulled back to reveal both boys lying limp on chaises beside the tub, their arms and legs splayed out as if in a dance.
A fly made a four-point landing on Sakda's dewy cheek.
The camera zoomed in, then the screen faded to black. Off camera, Henri whispered his signature line, “Is everybody happy?”
Henri ran the film again, tweaked it, and cut it to ten minutes of savagely beautiful videography for Horst and his company of pervs, a teaser to get them hot for another film.
He composed an e-mail, attached a still shot from the video: the two boys open-eyed, underwater, their faces contorted in terror.
“Offered for your viewing pleasure,” he wrote, “two young princes for the price of one.” He sent the e-mail as the door chimes rang again.
Henri tightened the sash of his robe and opened the door.
The boys burst out laughing, Aroon saying, “So, are we dead, Daddy? We don't feel dead.”
“No, you look very much alive. My two good, lively boys. Let's go to the beach,” Henri said, putting a hand on each of their slender shoulders, leading the boys out the back door of his villa.
“No games, Daddy?”
He tousled the boy's hair, and Sakda grinned up at him. “No, just swimming and splashing,” Henri said. “And then back here for my lovely massage.”
Chapter 60
Henri's well-earned holiday continued in Bangkok, one of his favorite cities in all the world.
He met the Swedish girl in the night market, where she was struggling to translate baht into euros so that she could decide whether to buy a small wooden elephant. His Swedish was good enough that she spoke to him in her own language until, laughing, he said, “I've used up all of my Swedish.”
“Let's try this,” she said in perfect, British-inflected English. She introduced herself as Mai-Britt Olsen, telling Henri that she was on holiday with classmates from Stockholm University.
The girl was striking, nineteen or twenty and nearly six feet tall. She wore her flaxen hair cut straight at the shoulders, drawing his attention to her lovely throat.
“You have remarkable blue eyes,” he said.
She said, “Oooh,” and batted her lashes comically, and Henri laughed. She waggled her little elephant, and said, “I'm looking for a monkey, also.”
She took Henri's arm and they strolled down the aisles of colorfully lit stalls of fruit and costume jewelry and sweets.
“My girlfriends and I went to the elephant polo today,” Mai-Britt told him, “and tomorrow we're invited to the palace. We are volleyball players,” she explained. “The 2008 Olympics.”
“Truly? That's fantastic. Hey, I hear the palace is really stupendous. As for me, tomorrow morning I'm going to be strapped into a projectile heading to California.”